The present disclosure relates to transportation infrastructure generally, and more particularly, to methods and systems for vehicle-centric railway wayside asset monitoring and system optimization.
The worldwide demand for passenger and freight travel is expected to double by 2050, compared with 2010 levels requiring an additional 200,000 miles of rail track. Meeting this demand will require increased train speeds, loads and frequency, adding stress on the aging railway infrastructure. Railroads and regulatory bodies have adopted programs to address growing safety needs. One of these initiatives is the Positive Train Control (PTC) regulation resulting from the United States Railway Safety Act of 2008 (RSIA). These safety initiatives, coupled with a need for improved operations, require a recurrent mapping and monitoring of railroad assets.
In the United States, the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 requires passenger railroad and Class I railroad to install positive train control (PTC) on main lines used to transport passengers or toxic-by-inhalation hazardous materials. One portion of this requirement entails mapping over 60,000 miles of right-of-way and 476,000 assets.
The asset database, including critical features such as the presence of signals and switches, must be validated asset-by-asset and mile-by-mile at regular intervals. The railroads must ensure that what is displayed to the train crew via the track database and onboard system reflects what is shown by railroad signal and what is actually present on the ground. Furthermore, construction and validation of the rail asset database is a continuous process since almost all changes to the railroad infrastructure require its modification and re-validation. Validation of the database is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. What is needed is a system to create, update, validate and access information about the location and status of wayside assets.
With respect to geographic information systems (GIS), the accuracy of the information required for PTC is significantly more precise than what is required to run a safe and efficient railroad in a non-PTC environment. Today, there are approximately 500,000 critical assets that must be geo-located to a horizontal precision of less than 2.2 meters (˜7 feet) and a vertical precision of 0.8 m (˜2 feet) to provide the accuracy necessary to safely warn or stop a locomotive. Additionally, yards, industry, and other connecting track must also be mapped to account for entry onto and exit from PTC track totaling more than 63,000 miles of right-of-way.
There are substantial challenges to developing and implementing a sustainable process to document and update the location every time one of the over 460,000 critical PTC assets is moved by more than 1 foot. Updating the PTC track database is a continuous process since almost all changes that occur in the railroad infrastructure require reconstruction and revalidation.
In terms of the PTC initiative, one of the most challenging aspects is the requirement for interoperability and real-time communication between the various system components. This is in part due to the fact that the component systems are developed by various suppliers, and the implementations by each differ across the various railroad companies. However, there have been unforeseen challenges in retrofitting an aging railroad infrastructure that was not designed with today's technologies in mind. All these factors have led to significant program delays and have raised questions about the practicality of the current approach. In light of such challenges, the ability to implement one of the component systems, the track database in a manner that is not strictly dependent on the operation of other components subsystems offers a way forward to improving safety and advancing progress toward meeting regulatory requirements.